Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Latest On Useless Skills Council

The Bloke puts in his two-pennyworth on the LSC

The now £11bn pa Learning and Skills Council is yet another shambolic quango that costs plenty and spreads misery throughout the land.

We've blogged it several times (eg see here and here), and when the Public Accounts Committee probed it, they discovered a bureacratic quagmire of 500 (yes 500) separate bodies and organisations, even including a specialist "Bureaucracy Review Group".

"The LSC has managed to spend £54.4 million making its own staff redundant since it was created in 2001. A further £61.9 million of taxpayer's money was spent in the year before its launch winding up its predecessor, the national network of Training and Enterprise Councils, bringing the total bill to more than £116 million since 2000."

Outside of winding up the coal mines, redundancy payments on this scale usually tell a tale of total management incompetence. Which of course is what we have at the LSC.

A friend of one of the young Tylers actually got a temporary job with the LSC local branch. He described a world of hand-to-mouth management, unmotivated clock-watching temps who could find no other work, and endless meetings for anyone above the rank of junior assistant bottlewasher.

Fortunately he got out, and is now at a private psychiatric clinic in Switzerland trying to rebuild his sanity.

BOM the book now available

Drawing on six years of blogging government waste, this book shows how we spend far more than we need on our public services. It sets out the facts and explores the underlying issues. Just why does government spend so much and deliver such second rate service? Why do we put up with it? And what are the alternatives?

ABOUT BOM

Despite all the talk of cuts, government still consumes nearly half our national income. Yet many tens of billions of its spending is wasted, with taxpayers made to pick up the tab for a depressing array of overpriced sub-standard services. This is money we can no longer afford, and our National Debt is already at danger level.

If we're to avoid further decades of stagnation and austerity we urgently need to find another way. Exposing and understanding the wastefulness of government is a necessary step in the right direction.